Mark Fisher’s _Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative?_ engages
in ~schadenfreude~ of a most peculiar kind: it is deeply gratifying
to read Fisher’s excoriating rebuke of contemporary capitalist
culture and his lucid description of the frustrations of those
caught within the insipid logic of administrations and bureaucracies
or the self-abasement of management to meet superficial outcomes;
yet, the misfortune we take pleasure in is our own. Indeed, Fisher’s
dynamic style, his Zizekian attunement to the absurdities of
postmodern culture delivered with the same ironic wit, and his
insightful use of film and popular culture to demonstrate his
points, act as palliatives to the supremely pessimistic view that he
ultimately roots in the structure of capitalism. It is this irony,
this double-stance, that makes _Capitalist Realism_ both an
important work and one to be treated with a critical distance. On
the one hand, it accurately locates the current feelings of
impotence to effect meaningful change to the anomie engendered
through capitalism and neoliberalist economics in particular, the
resignation toward the undeniable intrusion of a reductive
capitalist logic in every sphere of society. On the other hand,
Fisher demonstrates partial signs of succumbing to what Walter
Benjamin called Left melancholia. As Wendy Brown describes it,
“~left melancholy~ is Benjamin’s unambivalent epithet for the
revolutionary… who is, finally, attached more to a particular
political analysis or ideal–even to the failure of that ideal–than
to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present… [It]
represents… a refusal to come to terms with the particular
character of the present” and “signifies, as well, a certain
narcissism with regard to one’s past political attachments and
identity.”[1] While it is unfair to describe Fisher as a
revolutionary–he’s a cultural theorist–and while he does
acknowledge and makes efforts to accommodate the unique character of
the present, the sustained exasperation of the way capitalism has
infected our life world and even our fantasies, in part derived from
his own private experience as an educator, and the symptoms he
points out everywhere of this decrepitude leads him to a curious
retro-Marxism that seems incommensurate with the times he so lucidly
describes.

At issue for Fisher is what he calls capitalist realism, a concept
deeply indebted to Frederic Jameson: that sense that we have entered
a stage of capitalism that precludes our ability to imagine any
alternative to this system. Indeed, he argues, it is easier to
imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism. For Fisher,
there are three primary reasons for this state of affairs. The first
is that, unlike when Frederic Jameson famously argued in 1984 for
postmodernism as a cultural dominant, today’s state of capitalism
does not have a feasible political alternative. It was in the 1980s
that neoliberal economics asserted itself at the political level
through Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, dismantling unions,
deregulating the market, establishing right-to-work states and
capitalizing on flexible accumulation to make obsolete, once and for
all, the mobilization of a proletariat capable of sustained
revolutionary unity. In other words, postmodernism has been so
intensified as to generate a qualitative change that the term
capitalist realism is meant to capture. There is no political
alternative by which to ideologically, if not in practice, challenge
the capitalist order. In the nineties, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton
confirmed the cooptation of the left into the logic of neoliberalism
by adhering to the belief in the inevitability of so-called
globalization and supply-side economics. A second distinction is in
the obsolescence of postmodernism’s challenge to modernism. Where
postmodernism embraced difference and plurality, parody, and
complicitous critique (to use Linda Hutcheon’s phrase), it now takes
for granted this challenge and itself becomes, along with modernist
styles, a frozen aesthetic, an expressionless commodity decorating
the background of our life world. “Capitalism,” as he so eloquently
puts it, “is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of
ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the
consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.”[2]
Lastly, an entire generation has now been born following the collapse
of the Berlin Wall. This means that for those who have only ever
known a world of capitalist totalizations, there is no actual
alternative to point to. Instead, individuals are “precorporated”:
that is, their desires and fantasies are fabricated through a
sustained, ubiquitous onslaught of advertising campaigns which makes
subversion merely one more fad to be absorbed into the eternal
present of the culture industry.

This precorporation operates at the level of the dissenter as well.
One can only look on with a cynical distance, maintaining a knowledge
and belief in the evils of capitalism as the only feasible stance, a
kind of weary resignation, even as one participates in the very
structures of capitalism. Holding a retirement savings plan,
investing in education accounts for one’s children, or purchasing any
number of forms of insurance signal our participation in the very
thing we abhor. “What needs to be kept in mind,” Fisher notes, “is
both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and
that it would be nothing without our co-operation.”[3] Indeed, this
intensified power of absorption is, for Fisher, a key distinction
with postmodernism as Jameson used the term. Where Jameson argued for
a “cognitive mapping” to navigate the vertiginous spaces of
postmodern culture, Fisher suggests such mapping can only take place
within a predetermined capitalist topography, making such a notion
obsolete. He notes the capacity for capitalism to flourish off of the
anti-capitalism endemic to it: “so long as we believe (in our hearts)
that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in
capitalist exchange.”[4] Thus, in another variation on his
definition, Fisher says that capitalist realism is a “pervasive
atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also
the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of
invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”[5] The
comprehensive naturalization of inequities and destruction fostered
by capitalism–poverty, famine, war, as if these things were
unavoidable and simply the way of the world regardless of political
economy–also engenders a “reflexive impotence,” this sense that one
can’t do anything about it except to acknowledge that it is bad.

Fisher points to the pervasive symptoms of disaffection in this world
of capitalist realism via the interpretation of culture, particularly
film and music. An examination of Alfonso Cuaron’s _Children of Men_
opens his book, providing the outward expression of a generalized
affect disorder and terminal resignation at the heart of the
contemporary order: “The world that [_Children of Men_] projects
seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an
alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism
and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and
franchise coffee bars co-exist.”[6] The anxiety that the film
expresses–mysteriously humanity is unable to reproduce in the
dystopian world of the film and therefore sits on the brink of
extinction–is the anxiety of capitalist realism. For Fisher, the
film primarily asks, “how long can a culture persist without the
new?”[7] This anxiety, which he will locate everywhere in our lived
experience, “cries out to be read in cultural terms.”[8] This signals
Fisher’s primary tactic of seeing the epiphenomena of capitalist
realism primarily as an organizer of unhealthy subjectivity, a
generator of the disenfranchisement and alienation of the individual
in the grips of a monstrous, faceless, uncaring system. Kurt Cobain
of Nirvana, the “alternative” or “independent” rock band, is
exemplary of the tortuous situation we find ourselves in: Cobain’s
directionless rage and awareness of his own precorporation, his
self-realization of being a cliche in a culture of the spectacle, is,
in fact, the situation of each individual and all modes of dissent.
Hip hop, Frank Miller and James Ellroy are other eclectic examples of
a stark and unflinching view of the pathologies of capitalist
realism–raging against the machine, where the machine is nowhere to
be found, but everywhere to be felt.

The critique of capitalist realism as an attack on the subject can be
most keenly understood, according to Fisher, in the routinization of
affect disorders. For instance, one of the cultural symptoms of
dispossession that Fisher notes through his experience as a teacher
at a Further Education college in England, is the astonishing rates
of depression, particularly among young people. Fisher notes that
this pervasive depression has taken on a new, hedonic character:
rather than students being unable to find pleasure, they instead
can’t do anything but pursue pleasure compulsively. “In large part,”
he explains, “this is a consequence of students’ ambiguous structural
position, stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary
institutions and their new status as consumers of services.”[9] In
the former situation, they are surveilled and tested regularly,
subject to abstract authoritarian controls governed by the relics of
an old, panoptic form of education; but this Foucauldian brand of
homogeneous power has altered because of the latter situation, where
students inhabit an amorphous consumer space where they exercise
“free choice” as consumers seeking ephemeral satisfactions. These
choices take place in an environment of what Fisher calls a “business
ontology,” the presumption that everything can and ought to be
subordinated to a business strategy. Students are consumers of
education, just as patients are consumers of health care or the pious
are consumers of religion–one finds the commodity that seems most
appealing. Students who fail need not be overly concerned because the
system requires them to populate classrooms for the university to be
economically viable. The result is not a nurturing of a
will-to-achieve, but a slackening of will; rather than a deepening of
intellectual investment, there is a generalized apathy and boredom at
intellectual labor. The consumer seeks entertainment not knowledge,
requires a certificate to authenticate capability and not knowledge
to demonstrate a skill. This is itself reinforced through the
technologies of assimilation, the pervasive virtual community that
everywhere demands individuals to be connected through social media,
texting or gaming, for fear of confronting an intolerable isolation
or missing an event–no matter how vague or superficial the event is.
Technologies as instruments of capitalist realism breed shallow
conformity at scales previously unknown. With characteristic
drollery, Fisher states: “To be bored simply means to be removed from
the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and
fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary
gratification on demand.”[10] This communicative sensation-stimulus
matrix lacks any authority, fosters anonymity even while forming
fleeting identifications, and supplants concentration with frenetic,
ceaseless distraction. “The carceral regime of discipline,” Fisher
concludes, “is being eroded by the technologies of control, with
their systems of perpetual consumption and continuous
development.”[11] Not even the home or the family can supply an
adequate center of discipline since households require both parents
to work, if indeed the household remains intact, and increasingly
defer disciplinarian action to teachers or care-givers. Thus, hedonic
depression suggests a breakdown in the logic of capitalist realism,
an intrusion of the Real into the fabricated and illusory happiness
in the virtual community of consumers promulgated by advertisers and
PR people.

The ideological mask that obfuscates the gravity of this steadily
increasing pathology of capitalist life is in what Fisher calls the
privatization of stress. The privatization of stress refers to the
reduction of mental disorders to mere chemical imbalances in the
brain whose socio-political organization and instantiation within a
dysfunctional economic system is hidden by the perpetuation of the
view that any disorder is strictly within one’s head or a result of
family environment. In other words, the individual bears the
responsibility for his/her own disorder. The discussions concerning
the astonishing rash of spree killings in the U.S. over the last two
decades, for instance, are invariably reduced to a debate concerning
gun control and better screening of mental illness. What remains
absent from these discussions is the degree to which socio-economic
order facilitates such psychopathic violence. If a dysfunctional
family is known to cause a range of aberrant behaviors and affect
disorders, then the dysfunction of capitalism should also be central
to a diagnosis of disease found in such significant numbers and at
such significant scales. “It goes without saying that all mental
illnesses are neurologically instantiated,” Fisher argues, “but this
says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that
depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs
to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of
serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation…”[12]
Rather than treat the cause of the disorder, which would be to
recognize the sociological character of mental disorders, capitalist
society instead offers medications to re-balance neurotransmitters or
anxiolytics to ease the stress generated by precarious job security,
uncertain social relations and especially the culture of fear that
saturates our media space. Needless to say this reinforces and
justifies the cult of individuality that capitalism depends
upon–inalienable rights to the pursuit of pharmacologically induced
happiness–and refocuses responsibility on taking one’s meds. But it
also, of course, legitimates the authority and power of the
pharmaceutical industry.

All of this, Fisher contends, is rooted in neoliberalism, the mode of
capitalism that has succeeded the Cold War, whose promise of the
liberation of the individual from what Fisher calls the Nanny State
through consumer choice, the faith in the internal regulation of the
market through a Smithian invisible hand (in turn requiring a
deregulation of banking and trade), and the glorification of the
decrease of inefficiencies by the elimination of the State
“middleman” has proven to be a lie. In fact neoliberalism has only
created a new, more virulent form of subjectification, bureaucratic
inefficiency and gross inequity. Authority has become increasingly
decentralized and faceless, while responsibility is redirected onto
individuals who must make the proper consumer choice to act ethically
or be happy. The consumer ought to recycle or purchase fair trade
goods, thereby dictating ethical and responsible conduct through
purchasing choice–which, of course, converts ethics into an act of
exchange and averts focus on root systemic causes. Capitalism, then,
sheaths its instrumental reasoning, its dehumanizing and
dispassionate mode of operating exclusively for profit, and
ultimately the contradictions that arise from these instrumental ends
with a facade of social responsibility and empathy.

Fisher, therefore, attacks what he calls Really Existing Capitalism
as a counter to this neoliberal fantasy. Really Existing Capitalism
refers to the disparity between what we know to be true of corporate
greed or financial speculations and the dissemination of the
spectacle of capitalism, that image of capitalism fabricated through
PR and advertising that projects an image of itself as ethical and
responsible. Fisher instead shows that in fact Really Existing
Capitalism increases bureaucratic inefficiencies and the absurd
rationality of administration and business ontology; it in fact
reproduces precisely what neoliberals found so abhorrent in Stalin’s
socialism, which is the foil, as it were, to the neoliberal
philosophy. Soviet Russia generated a fundamental contradiction
between the official State versions of reality and the actual lived
experience of those within the Soviet Union. By borrowing from
Zizek’s Lacanian diagnosis of culture through the “big Other,” Fisher
shows that the same contradiction in Really Existing Socialism exists
in Really Existing Capitalism. The “big Other,” the nebulous “They”
that organizes the collective fictions that everyone is structured
by, projects a view of capitalism that is deeply concerned with
global warming or mass starvation, seeks the eradication of disease
or the empowering of colonialized cultures through smart
technologies. But the reality that we all know to be the case by
virtue of our lived experience is, in fact, the opposite: greater
environmental destruction, pandemics and increased poverty among
colonized subjects. “Capitalism’s rapacity,” Fisher notes, “depends
upon various forms of sheathing. Really Existing Capitalism is marked
by the same division which characterized Really Existing socialism,
between, on the one hand, an official culture in which capitalist
enterprises are presented as socially responsible and caring, and, on
the other, a widespread awareness that companies are actually
corrupt, ruthless, etc.”[13] In other words, the basic contradiction
of capitalism is that, internal to its logic, is the need for
anti-production, the ideological sheathing through PR, branding and
advertising of the sheer brutality and monstrousness of a system that
demands ceaseless, malignant growth.

In perhaps the most gratifying critique of this phenomenon, Fisher
points to the endless, tedious evaluations of labor performance.
Labor is, by its nature, resistant to quantification. For instance,
recently our department had to rewrite our tenure and promotion
guidelines according to performance. Many weighty and meaningful
questions arose: is a short story the equivalent of a scholarly
article? What if the scholarly article was published in a middling
journal but the story was published in a reputable but commercial
magazine? How many poems add up to a book publication? Is a haiku
equivalent to a four page lyric poem? Should research in preparation
for a class count as teaching or research? Is one’s work with a
faculty council service or teaching? But the importance of answering
these enriching questions is not because it clarifies performance,
but because it clarifies the placement of activities in the proper
metric by which we evaluate ourselves. In other words, the actual
labor is secondary to the perceived labor performance. This can then
be used to provide an assessment to administrators who either confirm
or deny the self-assessment based not on the actual produced material
but on the perception of our performance we provided. Fisher
describes it thus:

the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure
forms of labor… has inevitably required additional layers of
management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct
comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison
between the audited representation of that performance and
output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes
geared towards the generation and massaging of representations
rather than to the official goals of the work itself.[14]

Now, of course, one is in the irresolvable dilemma of deciding if
performance measures are measuring some kind of labor or are they in
fact determining the nature of the labor to be performed so that
there is a validation of the pre-ordained goal or outcome. While
layers and layers of bureaucracy try to capture this in finer and
finer detail, greater inefficiencies arise and, of course, apathy and
lassitude creep in.

What Fisher is delineating is the degree to which we become entrapped
within the contradictory logic of capitalism at the level of labor
and routine as well as through our, at best, weary yet frustrated
resignation, at worst, private pathologies. While Fisher appeals to
Marxist critiques of post-Fordist capitalism, specifically such
figures as Christian Marazzi, Richard Sennett and David Harvey, who
in their various ways point to the deleterious effects on individuals
and the family unit of flexible accumulation, mobile and temporary
work-forces, just-in-time production, and the other supple and
adaptable modes of generating capital, his overwhelming method is to
examine the subjective experience of our lived situation within this
system. In a world in which everything is reducible to commodity
exchange, where emotions and behavioral responses are scripted
through a media semiotics that pre-exists the individual’s entrance
into the world and thereby precorporates him or her and where old
ideologies have been conquered by incorporation and assimilation,
turned into fashionable pastiches or retro-trends (think the Hipster,
who recreates the form of the Beat generation counter-culture with no
historical consciousness of the Beat generation or their political
position): in a world such as this, there is no exit. The subject is
captive, fully interpellated, and impotent; s/he seeks artificial
forms of distraction and stimulation to mask the despair and
loneliness of postmodern life–not a modernist world of the
existential void or the abyss of forlornness, but a capitalist
realist world of super-saturation, excess and demands for ceaseless
pleasure. In such a world, to use what is by now a cliche, resistance
is futile.

Or is it? Despite this postmodern no exit mentality, Fisher offers,
if only vaguely and briefly, possible modes of resistance. What the
examination of the culture of capitalist realism reveals is the
incessant anxiety, the daily pathologies and affect disorders, that
structure life today. But it also points to the eruption of the Real
in the ideological, hyperreal facade of capitalism. The dysfunction
of capitalism cannot be contained: “what is required is that effect
be connected to structural cause.”[15] In particular, Fisher locates
three spaces in the Real that intrude into the reality capitalism
fashions for us and holds some potential to rip through the
pasteboard mask of capitalist ideology: the environment, mental
health and the inefficiencies of bureaucracy. As we have seen, Fisher
focuses on the latter two, which are far less recognizable and
contested. Because of the ubiquity of mental disorders, Fisher
believes that one can politicize the disaffection of the people: “We
must convert widespread mental health problems from medicalized
conditions into effective antagonisms. Affective disorders are forms
of captured discontent; this disaffection can and must be channeled
outwards, directed towards its real cause, Capital.”[16] What form
this would take and how this could be practically implemented as a
strategy of resistance is not entirely clear, but the idea is
certainly an intriguing one. In some sense, one might imagine that we
alter the emphasis from an over-pathologizing, which justifies a
medicalization of problems to be governed by insurance and
pharmaceutical companies, toward seeking the socio-economic structure
that induces imbalances in brain chemistry or fosters environments of
stress. In addition to this mobilization of affective disorders, the
transformation of bureaucracies from a top-down form–a form
admonished by neoliberal proponents as a necessary evil of socialist
organization–to a decentralized form has, in fact, produced more
bureaucratic inefficiencies and belies the view that neoliberal
economics reduces bureaucracy and operates more efficiently. In other
words, if one of the central promises of neoliberalism, namely to
enhance efficiencies through the elimination of bureaucracies, is
demonstrably false, then striking against this false promise by
reference to the commonly experienced frustrations of people through,
say, telephone call-services, endless consumer surveys or performance
self-assessments can unite people toward a common goal of change. For
Fisher, one can challenge bureaucratic anonymity and dispersal of
responsibility, with its emphasis on self-evaluation, by forming a
“new (collective) political subject.”[17]

What Fisher attempts to show in his book is that the illusory claim
by neoliberals to have removed the big Other by dispersing control
and freedom through the consumer and his/her individual choice has,
in fact, merely reproduced a more insidious and problematic form of
the big Other. In a passage analyzing Kafka, he makes this point
clear: “the supreme genius of Kafka was to have explored ~the
negative atheology~ proper to Capital: the centre is missing, but we
cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is
nothing there–it is that what is there is not capable of exercising
responsibility.”[18] Fisher sees this typified, humorously enough, in
the TV show ~Supernanny~, in which the Supernanny must come into a
household that has given unbridled freedom to children to pursue
pleasure. The result is an increasingly tyrannical demand on the
parents who only seek to mollify the children with more pleasure. In
essence, the big Other as the position from which Law projects, where
prohibitions are announced, is transformed into an imperative to
enjoy, giving the appearance of failed parenting at the level of
impeding enjoyment. “Supernanny,” Fisher points out, “has to sort out
problems of socialization that the family can no longer resolve. A
~Marxist~ Supernanny would of course turn away from the
troubleshooting of individual families to look at the structural
causes which produce the same repeated effect.”[19] Thus, he argues,
a reinstitution of the big Other is necessary. While advocating for
some authoritarian or disciplinarian regime via the State has proven
to be undesirable, some form of stability through a mobilization of
the state is necessary. Unfettered pleasure-seeking, which capitalism
promotes because it lubricates the structural machinery of Capital,
must be reined in.

In contrast to postmodern or post-structuralist thought, Fisher
insists that the left should reconceive itself by reinvigorating
Marxism and seek not to establish the state as some monolithic
regulatory organization, but to “subordinate the state to the general
will.”[20] In a manner similar to his claim that we must make
“effective antagonisms” of affect disorders, Fisher eludes any
clarification of the general will, instead admitting that it is a
concept needing “resuscitating,” but would entail a conception of the
public as something other than an “aggregation of individuals and
their interests.”[21] In other words, the postmodern push toward
localized modes of dissent, deconstructions of identity by embracing
difference and plurality, and a suspicion of grand narratives should
be eschewed for a revival of the grand narrative of Marxism, with its
focus on the economic base: “we need to reassert that, far from being
isolated, contingent problems, these [symptoms of the failures of a
capitalist worldview] are all the effects of a single systemic cause:
Capital.”[22] Indeed, “Anti-capitalism must oppose Capital’s
globalism with its own, authentic, universality.”[23] He goes on to
briefly describe a set of contestatory tactics that, strategically
might “begin by building on the desires which neoliberalism has
generated but which it has been unable to satisfy,” such as cutting
down on bureaucracy, eliminating certain forms of labor (in
particular the excessive auditing), organizing labor protests to
specifically target management, and collectively managing the
rationing of desires (although he admits what form this collective
management would take requires more thought). Subordinating the state
to the general will would be the new goal of a Marxist revolution,
but would require a series of small steps to effectuate the change in
what is otherwise a seemingly intractable situation. By locating and
attacking even the tiniest hole in the ideological tapestry of
capitalist realism, a chain reaction might occur that can rend the
fabric entirely.

At the outset of this review, I noted that Fisher lapses into a
quasi-left melancholia, a kind of dogmatism of political analysis and
call for change rooted in an unwillingness to recognize the peculiar
conditions of the present. In fact, Fisher does spend considerable
time specifying what is unique about the present in terms of
diagnosing the dysfunction of capitalism in the realm of today’s
culture and how it points to the underlying economic cause. He
challenges the political strategies of postmodernists by noting how
the situation has changed since their pronouncements. He particularly
notes how the financial crisis of 2008 is a tarnishing of the veneer
of capitalism and offers the opportunity of effecting the changes or
challenges to neoliberalism that could snowball into a significant
transformation. And because he doesn’t equate neoliberalism with
capitalist realism–the former is the current manifestation of
capitalist realism–he is aware of the contingent nature of
capitalist realism, that it is not a fixed or universal system but
one that can undergo historical alterations from within its own
systemic logic. After all, he points out, neoliberalism came about as
a kind of political revolution in the late 1970s, which suggests that
a counter measure to it is feasible. But despite all of this
self-awareness, the rhetorical force of Fisher’s argument, the
exasperation and frustration that is voiced in his acerbic wit, belie
the somewhat antiquated alternatives he ends up offering. Indeed, the
very premise of this slim book, that the end of the world is easier
to imagine then the end of capitalism, with its numerous examples of
just how entrapped we are, leads to the very thing he tells us so
convincingly it will lead to: reflexive impotence, a kind of
masochistic pleasure in reading the signs everywhere in a culture we
at once detest and enjoy. It is ironic, for instance, that in
Fisher’s examinations of ~Wall-E~ or ~Supernanny~ one can detect more
than a slight hint that he enjoys this same culture he lambasts. So
the book demonstrates the very thing it warns us against: giving
license to the enjoyment of capitalism because he knows in his heart
just how despicable capitalism is.

Perhaps what is most astonishing in Fisher’s proposed alternatives is
the return to notions of universality and totalizing explanations–as
if Capital, as the capital C suggests, is some essential quality to
capitalism, the driving force of profit at the center of capitalism.
Even though Fisher spends considerable time talking about the effects
of an endlessly malleable, supple system, a dynamic system capable of
assimilating dissent and transforming it into entertainment, of
reducing the voice of protest into a marketable idol, the structural
cause seems to be reducible to a single, ineffable Thing. At one
point, in yet another wrinkle of his definition of capitalist
realism, Fisher argues it is realism “in itself,” which refers to the
capacity of capitalism to reduce everything to brute material facts
capable of abstract exchange, namely, money. Whether Fisher intends
to appeal to a noumenal reality–I strongly suspect he does not–his
basic argument nonetheless falls into an essentialist trap. This
reducibility to a structure is problematic because it characterizes
structure as fixed–granted, dialectical in its dynamic movements
between production and anti-production, between ideological sheathing
and systemic exploitation, but nonetheless comprehensive and
homogenous in this dialectical structure. In other words, it falls
into the old problem of traditional Marxism: by only seeing the
superstructure as a dazzling array of effects that generate the
appearance of reality (in postmodern capitalism, the appearance of a
reality unmoored from its material roots), it tacitly presumes that
reality is a stable or static grounding, a mode of production that
operates and unfolds the same way everywhere. Similarly, the
alternatives–a state subordinated to the general will–offer two
more variations of the essentialist model which would, as a kind of
sweeping away of the current structure–offer a new structure in its
place. This grand revolutionary gesture, even if the very terms
“state” and “general will” are acknowledged to be uncertain and
requiring definition, is a backwards gesture, a return to a kind of
modernist sensibility in opposition to the postmodern one with which
Fisher is clearly uneasy. Fisher references the post-structuralists
on numerous occasions, drawing on some of their observations about
the nature of capitalism, and yet seems to neglect their refutations
of the idea of structure–including the structure of the subject.

Fisher’s emphasis on the subjective experience of life under
capitalist realism, its frustrations and anxieties, the affect
disorders and community dysfunction, presume a humanism–and perhaps
the most problematic tacit universal guiding his thinking. There is a
centering of the human, a valuation of capitalism and history as
exclusively a human phenomenon. That is, there is an
anthropomorphizing of problems that are operational and ontologically
independent, as if all of nature and capital is subordinated to human
will. Yet everywhere we look, as Fisher himself notes, the Real
erupts through the ideology, particularly in the form of
environmental devastation or pandemics. That is, the human
perspective is incidental to the ontologically distinct and inhuman
operation of these events. Market volatility, for instance, or global
warming do not depend on a human observer. This kind of
anthropocentrism, which haunts Fisher’s Marxist view, and
particularly his recommendations for change, ought to be critically
renegotiated as rigorously as capitalist realism itself.

In wanting to conceive of the state as subordinate to the general
will, one is faced with an awkward historical reversion to John Locke
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: devising a system of governance with
checks and balances, designed to work by the people, for the
people–as if the human power of administration and regulation,
predicated on an anthropocentric value system, is sufficient to
regulate the complexity of the problems we face. While it is true
that the American liberal democracy fetishizes the individual in
precisely the way Fisher protests, his appeal to a general will
abstracts the rights of the individual to the aggregate population.
It assumes a human power to overturn a system and to institute a new
and better one, where “human” here refers to a collective will that
universally can be reified. In other words, it doesn’t rid us of the
problem of the cult of individuality that capitalism so nourishes for
its advantage; rather, it maintains the illusory sense of the monadic
subject, capable of being colonized and corrupted through a faulty
system. What we need, the suggestion seems to be, is a system which
returns the subject to him or herself, allows the free expression of
his or her will to be in balance with the aggregate, even if
everywhere we see technologies that dissolve such notions of
subjectivity.

Ironically for Fisher, a certain measure of authority is required to
do this: a re-establishment of the big Other as a prohibitive check
on human desires, which, in capitalism, is left unfettered and
invariably leads to disaffection. The Supernanny state, regardless of
the presumed comic value he seeks in this analogy, operates on the
presumption that a big Other can limit our individual desires which,
id-like, operate with reckless abandon within each individual.
Capitalism nurtures the id and removes its limits, and the current
activities of the state merely facilitate the removal of boundaries
in the service of corporate interests. A Supernanny state which
institutes a new kind of big Other would help to coalesce these
individual desires into a harmonious general will. Or, if we take the
flip side of this, the general will already exists, but is only
restricted or duped by corporate modes of coercion and the Supernanny
will provide a means of unleashing this general will in a responsibly
hindered but liberated way. But this again presumes desire, where
general will is now a function of desire, a quality “in” the subject
and, by extension, “in” the masses. If the big Other is understood in
a Deleuzian sense, where there is a recognition that the libidinal
economy and the material economy are the same economy, where desire
is a material ontology, then the persistence of a humanist axiology,
so central to the ideological delusions of capitalism, can be
dismantled. But this humanism must be recognized in Marxism as well.
Thus, Fisher revives an old Marxist problem that the
post-structuralists, and indeed Lacan, refuted: the idea that
ideology is an external force that usurps the subject by transforming
his or her desires, this psychic space which is “in” the head, into a
consumerist need; therefore, what is needed is a liberation of the
subject from this reality principle by a radical alteration of the
reality principle. Somewhat reminiscent of Herbert Marcuse, Fisher
seems to suggest a revolutionary self-consciousness is required, an
internal transformation in order to assault capitalism as an external
force. But the whole point of the big Other is that it structures the
unconscious and makes the distinction between the subject and the
object artificial.

The problem, then, is that Fisher, while recognizing the inhuman
function of capitalism, remains entrenched in a value system that is
thoroughly humanist. He at once acknowledges the proliferation of
affect disorders as materially induced through capitalist
environments, yet seeks to use the individual’s disaffection as a
political tool, placing the possible resolution of an inhuman
capitalist realism exclusively in the realm of the human.

Interestingly, Fisher raises quite briefly a post-humanist view. In
critiquing Nick Land’s texts from the 1990s,[24] which posit the
possibility of an artificially intelligent capitalism at a global
scale which operates irrespective of human will, Fisher points to the
very concern I have articulated briefly here: “One of the problems
with Land’s position is… that it posits a ‘pure’ capitalism, a
capitalism which is only inhibited and blocked by ~extrinsic~, rather
than internal, elements.”[25] For Fisher, capitalism is
simultaneously the actual brutal exploitation and the sheathing of
this exploitation; it publicly decries its own insistent actions.
What Fisher does not consider here, which Land’s work points to, is a
possibility of an immanent change. Capitalism’s dynamism should not
only be conceived as a dialectical interaction between superstructure
and base, but as possessing its own ontological process of unfolding.
The very history of capitalism shows it to be a radically mutable,
mutating set of systems, operating at numerous scales of production,
organizing and destroying numerous markets, often without the aid of
human input. The last forty years have seen the growth of an entirely
new economy that operates in an exclusively virtual realm, the
finance market. While finance speculation has been largely
disastrous, it has also revealed a unique ontological potential
within capitalism itself: to distribute the ownership of material
property into a debt structure owned by hundreds of thousands. The
organization of this distribution of ownership is, of course,
nefarious and led to the financial meltdown of 2008. But it also has
revealed a virtual ontological property of contemporary capital,
namely, its capacity to distribute ownership laterally, to turn debt
ownership into public ownership. We can also point to the advent of
bitcoin, a virtual currency, which operate through a fully
decentralized consensus system whereby each transaction is vetted by
all users in a public database or ledger called the blockchain. This
allows for the transfer of digital currency free from any centralized
authority. The press generally focuses on the criminal use of
bitcoin, but it also points to an emerging capitalism that could
potentially make obsolete centralized banks that territorialize
finance for the purposes of concentrating wealth and maintaining the
profit motive.

A grand systemic change through targeted strikes, external pressures
on management, or even through violent revolution are no longer
realistic–at least if the goal is the eradication of capitalism.
Even terrorism is not a real threat to capitalism; rather, it seems
to nurture the authoritarian, fascistic dimensions of capitalism.
Instead a posthumanist critique of capitalism ought to be made, one
which examines the ontology of capitalism, its non-anthropic
mechanisms, and recognizes that the human experience is merely one
factor in capitalism’s operation. Such work is being done, for
instance, in the economic sphere by Benjamin Lozano, who provided the
above information about bitcoins and the finance market, and in the
realm of philosophy by the speculative realists. While these
de-anthropic accounts are themselves limited in precisely the way
Fisher is not–namely, in their exclusion of the existential toll of
capitalism–they nonetheless provide a framework for an effective
mode of transformation that does not depend on traditional and, to
some degree, antiquated Marxist critiques. (Where, for instance, does
the labor theory of value enter into a discussion of credit default
swaps?) My use of the term posthumanism, then, would not designate a
dismissal of the human experience. Acknowledging the suffering and
catastrophe induced by capitalism–the subjective experience, the
trauma of life under capitalism–is necessary but insufficient. This
view tacitly sees the human experience as separate or above the world
that it inhabits, as a thing which reacts to or shapes its own life
world from some universal and privileged position. But, in fact, the
human experience is necessarily tied to multiple environments through
which that experience unfolds, contingent on the multiple dimensions
in which human activity take place. We not only exist in the
artificially constructed human environments of cities and
nation-states, the cultural spaces of law and media, or within our
natural ecosystems, but we also inhabit increasingly a world of
virtual spaces, technologies that are self-sufficient,
self-organizing and increasingly autonomous. Capitalism already
operates in profound ways “self-directedly” (or “selves-directedly,”
since there are many capitalisms) in all of these environments.
Market volatility is subject to as many non-human factors as human
ones, not to mention environmental activities. Indeed, as I write
now, we have learned of complex malware which has infected the
Internet of Things and exposed an entire world of vulnerabilities at
the level of communicating objects. Perhaps this kind of
cyber-anarchy points to another mode of dissent against
capitalism–immanent transformation steered toward a dissolution of
the profit motive.

Fisher’s despair is not unlike the old joke Woody Allen’s character
Alvy Singer tells his audience at the beginning of Annie Hall: “Two
elderly women are at a Catskill’s mountain resort, and one of them
says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible’; the other one
says, ‘Yeah, I know, and such small portions!’ Well, that’s
essentially how I feel about life.” If we substitute capitalism for
life, we have Fisher’s Singer-esque position. And, like the
existentialists before him, Fisher seems to want to re-inspire the
absurd struggle, the humanist defiance of the fixed game, and thereby
returns to the past even as he acknowledges the future. While it is
crucial that such cultural diagnoses and perceptive critiques
continue, it is also crucial to begin decentering Man, to continue
the postmodernist project of dissolving binary oppositions,
patriarchy, attacking metaphysics, casting suspicion at grand
narratives, but to go further and recognize the technological and
virtual life world that now exists and operates in increasingly
self-directed, inhuman ways. Rather than the transcendental myth of
sweeping, universal change, we should seek immanent modes of
transformation.

[24] Nick Land is primarily known for his innovative and eclectic
philosophical analyses of culture in the 1990s in a number of
writings written for the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, a
short-lived interdisciplinary research collective he helped found in
1995. His writings come from a range of perspectives, generally
offering a strong critique of the Kantian legacy of delimiting
knowledge and its presumption of asserting anthopocentric control on
the inhuman force of generation that lies outside the human. His
controversial views, via a Deleuze-Guattarian ontology, that
capitalism, rather than being regulated and controlled, should be
accelerated to deepen and enhance the deterritorialization of social
mechanisms of control in order to release the uninhibited syntheses
of production (which he feels capitalism fosters), was met by general
disdain by the left. For a recent collection of Nick Land’s writings,
see: Nick Land, _Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007_,
eds. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic/Sequence
Press, 2001).

[25] Ibid, 46. Italics in original.

—————

Todd Hoffman is an associate professor at Augusta University in
Georgia, USA. He earned his doctorate through the philosophy and
English program at Purdue University. His areas of interest include
the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Marxist and
psychoanalytic theories, postmodernism, and contemporary American
literature. He is currently working on Deleuze’s ontology and its
interpretive and structural uses in examining literature, in
particular notions of flight or escape from totalizing social systems.